Donal Ryan is a master of the magnetic first line. They are usually brief, and either riveting or puzzling. “The world is filled with unwelcome words” begins a story about a lost wedding ring and a failing camera shop. “True as God” begins another, and another again: “The sky the day we shot the boy was clear and blue.”

There are acres of sky in A Slanting of the Sun. Even when it passes unmentioned, its temperamental mien can be felt, and characters frequently find cause to gaze upwards. This is Ryan’s third book and first short-story collection, though his debut novel, The Spinning Heart, could have been packaged as stories: for each of its 21 chapters, Ryan introduced a new narrator, inhabited a new voice. It won the Guardian first book award in 2013, and was longlisted for the Man Booker prize.

Crows haunt the skies of these stories. They “perch before bed for a nightly confab on the ridges of the roofs of all this town’s important buildings”; they “flap and reel, caw-cawing madly, heavy with corn”. Their presence, like the sky, is a visual anchor in a book saturated with invisible entities; with loneliness, with disappointed expectations, with complicated humanity. Other freighted objects include a laptop, a carrot cake, the sixth station of the cross. In “Physiotherapy” it is a pliable ball in a nursing home, poignantly squeezed by the narrator as she tries to keep her deteriorating muscles alive.

“Long Puck” is set in Syria; “Grace” recalls a journey that began in Africa; but the terrain to which Ryan faithfully returns, the fields and farms and housing estates above which his many crows circle, is that of counties Limerick and Tipperary. His faithful subject is rural despair; the poetry of adversity, the baffling fortitude of intrinsically decent people. “The houses of this road are strung with sorrow” reads a line in “Sky”; the same could be said of any road in any of these stories.

Characters habitually respond to despair either by falling silent or destroying themselves. An exceptionally high suicide rate is a grisly reality of contemporary Ireland; Ryan handles it carefully. Each case is rendered plausible by its particularity, its strangeness. In “The Squad”, a young woman avails herself of the visitor parking facilities before throwing herself from the Cliffs of Moher; her car is found with “a ticket on the dashboard to show she had paid as much for parking as the machine would allow her. The first three hours of her eternity were covered.”

These are plain-speaking stories, and in spite of the pervasive woe, this plain speech lends itself to blunt, bleak, brilliant humour. The droll jokes Ryan draws out of poetic adversity are what save A Slanting of the Sun from sentimentality. He also occasionally, astutely, extrapolates material from the national news, creating mouthpieces for those insufficiently represented by headlines. An episode in “Ragnarok” is derived from an ongoing migrant visa scandal; the twist which arrives at the end of “Nephthys and the Lark” is inspired by the recent abuse of vulnerable patients in a care home in Co Mayo. No voice is beyond this writer’s reach: criminal or hero, priest or Traveller, wise owl or innocent. The narrator of “From a Starless Night” ponders how “every sound ever made still exists. Everything I’ve ever said is still floating through the ether, and everything that was ever said to me.” Ryan writes as if he has a direct line to such ether.

And as for his “unwelcome words”, none of them is to be found here. Each unit of language has been scrupulously positioned, though the overall effect is of effortlessness. The opening story, “The Passion”, sets an allegorical tone, hinting at the varied “agonies” to follow. But its closing lines – “surely then there’ll be no going back from that and all that went before will just be dust” – echo those of Frank O’Connor’s “Guests of the Nation” as much as they do the New Testament (“And anything that ever happened to me after I never felt the same about again”). This collection shows Ryan adding his own elastic yet distinctive voice to O’Connor’s impeccable tradition.